Naming the Silences: God, Medicine, and the Problem of Suffering

Overview

Why does a good and all-powerful God allow us to experience such pain and suffering? This question, so often asked, has been approached in a variety of ways. In this illuminating and powerful book, Hauerwas explores why we seek explanations for suffering and evil so desperately in today’s world. He draws on true cases of ill and dying children to illustrate and clarify his discussion of the theological issues. Modern medicine, he claims, has too often become a noisy way to hide the gaping silences created by the experiences of childhood illness and death. He discovers for us a God who “can give a voice to that pain in a manner that at least gives us a way to go on.”

Offering no easy answers or false comforts, Naming the Silences is a provocative and sensitive exploration of pressing issues that concern us all.